Everything is bigger at the farm...even the weeds!

The past few weeks Ross and I have waged a war on the weeds at the farm. There are so many established plants that are starting to bloom but finding them among the weeds has been a challenge. Luckily the soil is pretty weed-pulling friendly so it isn't too terrible. So far I have weeded the bed behind the house that hosts some beautiful hydrangeas and the coolest Jacobs Walking Stick tree I have ever seen and all around the buildings where the weeds were literally starting to climb up the walls. The previous owner left some wine barrel planters for us that I weeded and can't wait to plant...I just have to decide what I want to put in them.

I even made the goats pull their weight and put them to the task of removing the blackberry bushes by the silo. They LOVE to eat the leaves and they went right to work. It was the easiest weeding I have ever done, except keeping them in the area proved to be a bit of a challenge. Once they removed all the leaves it was easy to get in there with my pruners and cut them out. Last night Ross and I scrambled to get ready for the hay bailers who are coming on Saturday by removing as much Bull Thistle as we possibly could. Bull Thistle is a class C noxious weed in Washington and is not something we want in our hay bales so we walked the field and cut down (or in Ross' case macheted) as much as we could before dark set in. If you have never seen thistle it has thorns that are crazy sharp and not a joy to handle - the big ones went right through my leather gloves. We worked fast and hard and were able to remove about four John Deere Gator loads before it got too dark to work, which was almost all of it. After seeing how much we took out I am very happy we took the time to do it as we removed a lot that would have been in our hay. In the future we will probably have to dig them out but for now we should have bull thistle free hay :)

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